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Author Archives: Deshamali Weerasekara

“I only feel angry when I see waste. When I see people throwing away things we could use.”
—Mother Teresa

According to the researchers we have produced enough plastics which can be covered whole planet. The effect of plastics to the environment is neglected by both people and governments for a long time. Unknowingly those plastics travel to the deepest parts of the sea bed and everywhere by giving us an unhealthy planet. While there are so many objections about banning plastics there should be a control mechanism to mitigate the damage to the environment by disposed plastics. But there is no way of completely limit the damage because there is no any safe disposal method introduced for plastics. Everywhere we can see empty bottles, supermarket bags, plastic straws, compact discs etc. The impact is highly damaging the planet.

The easiest and most effective method to reduce the amount of plastic waste is to reduce its production. Developing countries have a trend towards “a throw away concept” especially in urban areas. When countries become more industrialized and their per capita income increase, they generate more waste. However the amount of production depends on consumers’ patterns and their demands. Nowadays people are more concerned about getting their needs at the lowest price instead of concerning quality. Because of the low market price of low quality goods people tend to throw away their used goods without repairing and reusing them.

There are several methods which can be used to reduce the production of waste. They are improving packaging considering effect of waste stream, enhance recycling and reusing by the producer and increase the life span of the product.

The source separation, material recovery and recycling, will reduce the waste stream. Solid waste separation at household levels is continuously occuring at some level all over the world. The aim is to prevent most valuable and reusable items from being discarded. After the household level separation, waste pickers remove valuable items before garbage enters the waste stream. Currently, this happens in almost all municipalities in developing countries. Therefore, the need is extra encouragement for recycling.